What logic should we follow? What evidence should we look at to determine whether or not South Africa is a failed state? Or maybe we should simply believe our eyes.
It feels as if I have been swimming against the tides of commentary and opinion about South Africa being a failed state for several years. See here, here, here, and here for some of the pieces I have written on the topic in this space. I still don’t believe that South Africa is a failed state, least of all because of the Wall Street-Washington Axis’s late 20th-century power to “certify” failed, weak, fragile, collapsed, rogue or quasi-states. While each of these “definitions” differ, one from the other, they have in common the fact that they are, for the most part, post-colonial states, and Washington’s “power to certify” invariably clears a path for various interventions.
Having said that, the quasi-militarism of South African society by the various political factions, increased violence accompanying service delivery protests and land occupations, and violent confrontations between black and white parents at schools are a cause for deep concern.
Let’s look briefly at the self-awarded licence to intervene in sovereign countries by first defining them as…
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